In 1692, the writer, philosopher, poet, and Hieronymite nun Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz published her most monumental work: a 975-line poem, entitled Primero Sueño (First Dream), which chronicles the soul’s quest to find the outer limits of human knowledge. As the body sleeps, the soul attempts to follow existing philosophical schools to Enlightenment; only once the soul has fallen short of this objective does Sor Juana imply that this journey toward omniscience is hers. The text is intimate and highly symbolic, full of prescient insights on mysticism, feminism, and the power of both nature and nurture.
Today, Sor Juana still holds great significance in her native Mexico. She’s an icon of freedom of speech, women’s rights, and Mexican nationalism; her life and works have been adapted into biopics, Shakespearean plays, song cycles, and more. For the first time, from January 23–26, 2025, at The Met Cloisters, the words of Primero Sueño find an operatic voice thanks to a world-premiere collaboration between composer Paola Prestini and jazz singer-songwriter Magos Herrera.

Magos Herrera (left) and Paola Prestini (right). Collar by David Herrera. Image courtesy of Shervin Lainez
Prestini and Herrera, close friends and recent collaborators on the album Con Alma, embody Sor Juana’s spiritual journey as a physical procession through the sacred spaces of The Met Cloisters. Herrera herself plays Sor Juana, alongside the Leipzig-based vocal ensemble Sjaella and a team of virtuoso multi-instrumentalists.
I sat down with Primero Sueño’s creators and visionary director Louisa Proske, who returns to The Met after directing The Mother of Us All in 2020, to discuss the piece’s insights, innovations, and development. Our conversation has been edited and condensed for publication.
Emery Kerekes (The Met):
Tell me about the origins of this piece, and your first encounters with Sor Juana’s work—specifically, Primero Sueño. What jumped off the page and screamed “opera”?
Magos Herrera (co-creator and lead performer):
Growing up in Mexico, I learned about Sor Juana in school. She was very much a character in my cultural universe. One year, I gave Paola a book of Sor Juana for her birthday, and she very naturally said, “You know, we should do an opera with this piece.”
Paola Prestini (co-creator):
At that point, Louisa and I had connected—and she had a project emerging at The Met Cloisters. I’m pretty instinctual about the projects I take on. I always listen really carefully to the messages that life sends my way, because I don’t think it’s just happenstance. It felt too good to be true, so we combined forces and dove in.
Louisa Proske (director):
It was my dream to direct something at The Met Cloisters. I had this idea that we would take the audience from space to space, and that it would feel like a kind of ritual. And then Paola and Magos introduced me to Sor Juana’s work.
I immediately felt like those two things went together so beautifully. And I always feel—as I did with The Mother of Us All—that it’s beautiful when the piece doesn’t fit completely hand in glove. The Met Cloisters hail from the European Middle Ages, and Sor Juana represents New Spain and the Mexican Baroque. It’s a different period, it’s a different geographic context, it’s a different culture. But of course, there are a lot of echoes, and so it has just the right amount of tension.

Herrera (left) and Louisa Proske (right) in discussion during rehearsals. Image courtesy of VisionIntoArt
Herrera:
And I think something crucial in picking Primero Sueño, rather than any of Sor Juana’s other poems, is that it’s the only non-commissioned poem that she wrote. She wrote it because she wanted to write it, so in a way it’s like her confession, her deepest search. It’s an open book about who Sor Juana was. She wasn’t a mystic. She was an intellectual.
Prestini:
The dramaturgical arc was very much a collaboration. It’s very hard to play editor to something that’s perfect. So really thinking about, from a dramaturgical perspective, what’s important, what can and can’t stay? What symbols really matter? I think those were some of the things that stuck out to me: the pyramids, the stag, Nyctimene. To Sor Juana, what did Nyctimene mean, as a figure who had been raped? Was it just a literary reference, or was there something deeper?
Proske:
I really think it should be stressed how insane it is to make an opera out of this very dense, very abstract poem. It doesn’t really have a plot in the conventional sense, but I think my first impression was this incredibly Baroque use of opposites: darkness and light, silence and noise, life and death.
But this is actually a poem about failure and about how to live with it. Just before Sor Juana reaches the peak of her journey, she falls short of this complete knowledge that she longs for. Before she awakens, she has this vision of Phaeton, who wanted to drive his father Helios’s sun chariot (despite his warnings) and ended up burning the earth. Sor Juana says that Phaeton is a heroic figure to her, because he tried the impossible. He didn’t achieve his goal, but he achieved glory in the attempt.
You can read that in a human way, in that it’s impossible for us to ever understand the whole world. How do we live with that impossibility? You can understand it in a feminist way, in that it was impossible for Sor Juana to be an intellectual, a writer, a poet, because that wasn’t what women “should” be interested in. But she tries, and thereby others after her might succeed.
The last words of the poem are, “The world illuminates, and I awaken.” And suddenly the image of being awake has a new resonance. Like, what does it mean to be awake as an artist, or as a human? To really see what’s going on?

Image courtesy of VisionIntoArt
Kerekes:
Paola, Magos—tell me a bit about your collaborative process. How does the division of labor fall for you?
Prestini:
It’s a complete collaboration. We obviously have different methods of writing, but we spoke through everything thematically. Magos would record things and send them to me. I would write things and send them to her. I would orchestrate. She would improvise on top of things. It was pretty fluid.
Herrera:
I remember one day before we started writing, at Paola’s house, we realized it was going to have to be different from our previous album, which was Paola’s music next to my music, with some blending. We needed to write this together. We needed to be able to say, “I don’t like it.” That was hard, to put our egos aside.
Prestini:
But I feel like we really did. It was super fun because all of a sudden you’re two brains instead of one, two hearts instead of one. And then you trust each other. We’ve known each other a long time; we couldn’t do this if we didn’t. I understand Magos’s harmony. She understands where my melodies tend to lead. So when she’d write a melody into one of mine, it would turn out even better. For me, composing is the only place where I don’t have to listen to anybody, but for something like this, it just felt so right.
Kerekes:
Tell me a bit about the staging concept for Primero Sueño. How do you interact with the spaces and collections at The Met Cloisters? What’s the significance of processing through the galleries?
Proske:
Simply, we aimed to translate Sor Juana’s soul journey into a physical journey. On a tour of the Cloisters in 2020, I saw a beautiful relief of Jesus entering Jerusalem. It’s the story in the Bible that gives birth to this whole ritual of a procession, and so it’s beautiful to see that present in the Cloisters, because we want the moves between the spaces to be deeply woven into the meaning of the piece.

Workshop of Biduinus (Italian, active last quarter 12th century). Portal from the Church of San Leonardo al Frigido (detail), ca. 1175. Marble, 13 ft. 2 in. x 76 in. x 14 in. (401.3 x 193 x 35.6 cm). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, The Cloisters Collection, 1962 (62.189)
Another thing we learned on that tour was that very often, in medieval architecture, the entrance to a sacred building or a threshold from room to room would be accentuated and dramatized. For example, in the beautiful first archway that we pass through from the Romanesque Hall into Langon Chapel, the Sjaella singers are making a tunnel of sound on either side of the entrance. We’re not just walking through this dramatic architecture. For me, the Cloisters is a place that sings and dances.

Doorway from Moutiers-Saint-Jean, ca. 1250. Burgundy, France. White oolitic limestone with traces of paint, 15 ft. 5 in. x 12 ft. 7 in. x 55 in. (469.9 x 383.5 x 139.7 cm). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, The Cloisters Collection, 1932 (32.147)
Most of the art in the Cloisters was meant to be used, not hung on a wall. These objects were part of rituals, pieces of architecture that people used every day to go about their business. Cloisters were central places in a monastery: for praying, talking, walking from one place to another. They were very alive, and we’re bringing some of that life back with this piece.
The challenge of the production was to develop a dramaturgy of spaces. Where Sor Juana ascends the pyramid of light, that’s when we want to use the most regal space: the Fuentidueña Chapel, which has incredible drama due to its horizontal construction. I was fascinated by the Saint-Guilhem Cloister because the audience can move around the outside, so it’s a bit like they’re looking in on something secretive, almost spying through the dramatic columns. Every space suggests a new relationship between performers and audience.

Apse from San Martín at Fuentidueña, ca. 1175–1200. Segovia, Castile-León, Spain. Limestone, 30 ft. 2 in. x 24 ft. 7 in. x 27 ft. 8 in. (919.5 x 749.3 x 843.3 cm). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Exchange Loan from the Government of Spain (L.58.86a–f)
Prestini:
In one of the very first meetings that we had with Met Curator of Latin American Art Ronda Kasl, she showed us the escudos de monja—the nun’s badges—that The Met had just acquired. And that’s when we began to think of this concept of wearable technology. We obviously can’t hang projectors or speakers in the galleries, so what would it mean for each woman to have their own amplifier? That’s where we began constructing with Andrea Lauer, an amazing costume designer out of New York University, this concept of the badge incorporating amplification, projection, and light into a space that holds Sor Juana’s secrets.

Nicolás Rodríguez Juárez (Mexican, 1667–1734). Nun’s Badge with the Virgin of the Immaculate Conception, ca. 1710. Oil and gold on copper; tortoiseshell and silver frame, 8 1/4 in. (21 cm). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Purchase, Sansbury-Herbert Mills Fund, 2021 (2021.268)
Proske:
Escudos de monja have a fascinating history. At some point, convents made a rule that nuns couldn’t wear jewelry except for the escudo, which was a defined devotional object, painted with an important religious scene, that one would pray with and think about. And so, the escudo is almost like a visualization of what’s being contemplated in the heart. But then, escudo literally means “shield.” It protects the heart from evil influences.
Herrera:
We’re working with designers who understand this multidimensionality of Mexican culture. There’s Catholicism coming from Spain, native cosmology, and there’s also a huge African presence in Mexico. That’s the other fascinating thing about Sor Juana: She is the first writer that, in a way, defines what it is to be Mexican. It’s a new identity, not of Nueva Hispania but of Mexico. You can see it in the recipes that they cook in the convents, too—and so, this new identity comes together in a mixture, a mole.
Prestini:
The choice of instrumentalists reflects that as well. We wanted two musicians who could really embody the multiplicity of styles that we are traversing. From Italy we have Luca Tarantino, an incredible player of the theorbo, a Baroque instrument in the lute family; and from Mexico, the multi-instrumentalist, Celso Duarte, who is originally Paraguayan and plays in all sorts of styles. He understands the more improvisatory elements stemming from the folklore we’re exploring.

Image courtesy of VisionIntoArt
Proske:
We also knew from the beginning that the choreographer would be essential, especially when I saw Sjaella’s works and how physical they are. I knew this would be choreographed from start to finish, with movement deeply embodied.

Images courtesy of VisionIntoArt
Prestini:
Then Magos assembled this whole slate of unbelievable intellectuals in Mexico who are super aligned with the piece. We’re bringing the piece to Puebla, the fourth-largest city in Mexico, later this year. There’s this really deep respect for Sor Juana in Mexico. The first thing our creative advisory board said to us was, “Please don’t Frida Kahlo Sor Juana.” We took it very seriously.
Herrera:
At these workshops, we were at the Claustro de Sor Juana in Mexico City, literally in front of her tomb. It was almost like asking permission.
Kerekes:
What does Sor Juana have to say to a modern audience?
Proske:
Sor Juana was a revolutionary. In her time and place, women were only understood through their romantic interest in men. Sor Juana was a woman in love with knowledge, and her magnum opus is about her longing for a full understanding of the world. There’s a lot of speculation as to why she took the veil, but it was probably mainly to gain this freedom of an intellectual life.
Sor Juana was a woman in love with knowledge, and her magnum opus is about her longing for a full understanding of the world.
To me, that in itself makes her a totally inspiring character. You can interpret Sor Juana as very faithful, and the whole poem as considering God’s creation. You can also interpret it as going way beyond God, and the hubris of going beyond this institutional faith. She treads a very fine line, and she was constantly in trouble with religious authorities. She wrote arguments refuting the opinions of famous church authorities. And she had protection for a long time from the Spanish viceroyalty, among others. But she pissed off a lot of men in power, and at some point her protection ran out.
The axe really came down on her, as someone who didn’t accept the place she’d been assigned. She was one of the first people to argue that women and girls have a right to education. That seems so obvious now, but even today, in some places, it’s becoming harder for women to even get a basic education. So I think as a political figure, as a feminist figure, but then also as an artist and a poet, she continues to speak to us.
Prestini:
They took everything away from Sor Juana—her books, everything. But here we are, and we have her words, and they resonate in 2025. That’s pretty strong.
Herrera:
It’s incredible that after so many centuries, we’re still experiencing the endangerment of women’s rights. And Sor Juana not only pointed out that danger, but also how it threatens democracy. It makes me, as an immigrant, remember not to take it for granted. I mean, Sor Juana never traveled, yet her mind is so universal. And I think this piece—the idea of bringing Sor Juana and her message to The Met—is so powerful today.